Cricket: a new record innings at Lord’s
“It ended up being a good toss for Sam Northeast to lose,” said Will Macpherson in The Sunday Telegraph. Northeast, Glamorgan’s new captain, was asked to bat first in the opening round of the county championship, against Middlesex at Lord’s last Friday. After nearly nine hours at the crease, by 2:30pm on Saturday, he had scored 335 – the highest-ever score at Lord’s, the “home of cricket”. There have been more than 2,800 first-class matches played since the ground opened in 1814 – an estimated 70,000 individual innings, of which only six have been triple-centuries. Northeast’s was the largest of them all. There weren’t many spectators in the ground to see the achievement, said Tanya Aldred in The Observer, but those present understood the historic significance of the moment. When Northeast moved to 334 “with a shuffle-flick off his toes” – beating Graham Gooch’s previous record of 333, set against India in 1990 – he celebrated “to a host of empty white bucket seats but rapturous applause from the balcony”. He declared his team’s innings on 620 for 3 almost immediately after.
At 34, Northeast is “the best batter of his generation” not to have played for his country, said Andrew Miller on ESPN. His “formidable” 335 was not even his career-highest. Against Leicestershire two years ago he made 410, the biggest-ever score for Glamorgan and the ninthhighest in first-class cricket anywhere in the world. The “benign nature” of the Lord’s surface certainly helped him, said Richard Gibson in The Mail on Sunday. Only 15 wickets fell over four days, before the match was drawn. Northeast himself hadn’t considered the record until a spectator had mentioned it to him on his way through the pavilion; the nerves only took hold when he was on 330. “To break a record like that is beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.